Step 3: Creating Your Posts

To start a new post, in the dropdown revealed by the CHOOSE AN ACTION button, select MANAGE POSTS to access the Posts Manager.

This will open up the POST MANAGER window shown below.

Click when prompted to create a new post which opens up the POST EDITOR

The Post Editor

Firstly we give our post a title. You will see that as you type your title in the top left field, the post url and SEO title will automatically be updated in their respective fields on the right hand side in the Post Settings.

We can now write our post content in the same way as we would edit the content on any other page, but simplified as there is just the single column. You can insert any media that you would normally be able to insert, such as inline images, galleries or video.

Post Settings

Post template: None of your posts can display on your site unless you define a post template to use for each post. Get this sorted before you start writing any posts. The post template defines the layout and styling of your post. If you switch a post to use a different post template, it will be auto-updated to render according to that new template. See create a post template for more info.

Status: Here we can set the date we want to publish our post on, or un-publish it (hide it from our blog) by resetting it to a draft. Even if you don't want to display a date, you can use the date for ordering purposes in your post widgets.

Visible: A quick way of making a post visible or not without un-publishing.

Root Page:This specifies the web address of your post. Seting the root page to a page called BLOG is a likely scenario for a website containing numerous pages with a blog section. In this instance the address of your post would be something like:

Additionally, for advanced blog creators, you might have more than one part of your site that deals with post articles. You might have a News area of your site and also a Blog area. Or you might want to split your articles into different categories. In such a scenario, you would set the root page for each post as appropriate.

Post URI (slug): This is the part of the browser address specific to this post. This field automatically updates when you type your post title in the top left field. However you can override the slug so that it is different from the title if you want to for SEO reasons.

SEO Title: The page title presented to search engines. This field automatically updates when you type your post title in the top left field. Again, you can override this so that it is different from the post title displayed on the page if you want to for SEO reasons.

SEO Description: Where you can add a short description of the article for display in search engine results. See this article here for further details.

Post Image: Where you can add a hero image which will appear in your post widgets. Importantly, this will also be the image that shows up in Facebook / Twitter / LinkedIn if you share the link to your post.

Image ALT: A description of the main post image, vital for visually impaired visitors and to ensure your images are properly indexed in Google images results.

Tags: A tag is like a category. You can assign as many tags as you like, or no tags. The motivation for assigning tags is that you can then create post widgets that list only posts with certain tags.

Previewing your post

When you have applied all the settings and written your post, and most importantly have assigned a post template, and finally set your post to be published (see status above), then and only then can you click the PREVIEW button (next to the CHOOSE AN ACTION button in the image at the top of this page) and this will open your post in a new tab and it should be rendered within your selected post template. If your post doesn't render, then either it is not published, or you haven't created your post template properly. Go here and check you have inserted the placeholders and assigned a post template setting.

You're not quite finished yet. It's all very well having a bunch of posts published but visitors to your site need to be able to find those posts on your site. For that, you need to create some post widgets and embed them on a regular page. The post widget(s) will link to your various posts.